Counseling as a tool in combating violence in schools must be supported by strong PTA’s.
Now that Education Minister Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine has lifted the lid on his Ministry’s thoughts in the matter of responding to the problem of violence in schools, it is apposite to, once again, throw out this deeply disturbing issue for wider public discourse in the hope that some consensus can be arrived at as far as workable approaches to solving the problem is concerned.
This newspaper’s persistence in its editorializing on the matter of violence among schoolchildren and in schools has to do with our belief that the scale of the problem is yet to be matched by the application of the requisite levels of intellectual, organizational and material resources to tackling what may well be one of the more formidable threats to the very fabric of our education system.
Last weekend’s report in the Kaieteur News – based on an interview with Dr. Roopnaraine – alluded to only a handful of the incidents of violence amongst schoolchildren that occurred over the past almost three years. One suspects that there are no official records of a great many of the brawls and violent confrontations that take place amongst schoolchildren both inside and outside of the school setting so that the Ministry of Education may well have only a limited understanding of the scale of the problem. Public confrontations amongst rival gangs of schoolchildren on the streets of our capital have simply become too numerous to be properly officially documented. We have already said too that we believe that by and large the fact that many teachers – already insufficiently compensated, disillusioned and in some entirely justifiable instances fearful for their own safety – have given up on violent children, means that the authority figures have lost control of the situation.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with what Dr. Roopnaraine describes as “regular and professional counseling” in schools, both as a matter of course and as one of the means of tackling the problem of violence among schoolchildren both within and outside the school setting. We already know, however, that there is an acute shortage of “professional” Counselors in Guyana and an even greater shortage of Counselors who might be available to work in the education system. Our own enquiries have thrown up an estimate of around ten Counselors in the school system in Georgetown and even smaller numbers elsewhere across the country. As far as what the Education Minister says is his Ministry’s desire to “improve our counseling capacity in schools and improve the performance of Counselors” (which might be partially achieved through a greater focus on counseling as a facet of the standard CPCE teacher training programme) there are, of course, other approaches which, when added to counseling might well help to arrest the problem of violence among schoolchildren over a relatively shorter period of time.
Here again, this editorial places on the table the approach of building a stronger, far more pro-active school/parent/community relationship as a means of tackling the problem. Dr. Roopnaraine is correct in his assertion that “violence and indiscipline in the society (are) leaking into the school system which is precisely why we must look to “the society” (and specifically to parents and communities) for solutions.
Such efforts as have been made to foster more effective home/school relations through the mechanism of the Parent/Teacher Association have been less than effective. PTA’s vary from school to school and community to community in their effectiveness; whether or not they succeed invariably depends on the level of interest shown by the school and the parents and invariably the PTA mechanism is weakest (or non- existent) in schools and communities where they are most needed. On the whole the PTA has had a strictly limited effect in creating what this newspaper has previously described as “a contract” between parent and school. What is noteworthy is that during the worst recent years of violence in schools and amongst schoolchildren neither of Dr. Roopnaraine’s two immediate predecessors even attempted to make anything resembling a concerted effort to ‘call in’ the parents, so to speak.
Our argument for a home/school contract that uses the PTA as its foundation has to do with our belief that it is from the home (and the community) by and large, that children bring their dysfunctional tendencies. While we are often loathe to accept it, there is no single influence on the development of anti-social behaviour that is stronger than the family. While there is no single cause of youth violence, when there is a common factor that cuts across different incidents it is, frequently, some sort of family dysfunction. Children who become involved in violence at school frequently come from homes in which there is a long history of domestic violence or other forms of violence centred around the home and/or the community in which their parents might be involved. All too frequently those parents are disengaged from their children. When children are exposed to violence in the home, they often come to see violence as acceptable and become more likely to resort to violence to solve problems in the school setting.
Accordingly, efforts to reduce violence among schoolchildren and in schools stand an infinitely better chance of success if they include a systematic effort to engage parents in schooling their children. Short of what might well be intrusive and unwelcome ‘home invasion’ on the part of the school the best available option is to create an institution that affords both parent and teacher equal measures of legitimate access…the PTA. So that while there is clearly room for counseling in the school system the PTA has the capacity to be a defining instrument in enhancing the relationship between parent and school thereby creating a more convivial environment for providing an effective response to school-related violence.
